I have solved all my problems. And the sour look on Suzette’s face is just a bonus.
FIFTEEN
I have been tasked with the job of getting Mrs. Green home.
That is what I have been told. Mrs. Green had a mild heart attack, and she’s fine. Meaning she’s as fine as she was before. But I question whether she was actually fine before, because she has been fairly confused during her hospitalization, and her family told me she’s been falling a lot. One of the things I’ve learned since I started working in the hospital is that a large number of elderly people who live alone probably should not be living alone.
And if you want to get really freaked out, I’ll tell you how many of those same people are still driving.
Since getting my social work degree, I’ve worked in a variety of places. I started out working with children, but once I had a child of my own, I struggled to deal with some of the terrible things that happened to kids at the hands of people they were supposed to trust. Every night, I would hold Ada on my lap and sob about the atrocities I saw that day. It was tearing me apart.
It was Enzo who recognized what the work was doing to me and heard about an opening for a hospital social worker. I applied for the job, and it was the best thing that could have happened to me. I work with a primarily elderly population, and they need my help just as much as the kids did, but I don’t cry all the way home anymore.
Mrs. Green is lying in her hospital bed. She’s a tiny peanut of a woman, ninety-one years old, with a puff of downy-soft white hair and covers neatly tucked up to her armpits to cover the nightgown her family brought her from home.
“Hello, Mrs. Green,” I say. “Do you remember me? I’m Millie, your social worker.”
She smiles up at me. “Are you here to take out the trash? Because it’s very full.”
“No, I’m your social worker.” I get closer to her and point to the badge on my chest. Then I raise my voice because I suspect that could be the issue. Her chart said HoH, meaning hard of hearing. “SOCIAL WORKER.”
She nods in understanding. “Can you mop the floor too?”
“No.” I shake my head and point more emphatically to my badge. “I’M YOUR SOCIAL WORKER. I’M HERE TO HELP FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET YOU HOME!”
She points at a pile of clothing that is on the little hospital dresser. “And can you fold my clothes for me?”
I’m not here to clean Mrs. Green’s room or fold her laundry, but on the other hand, she’s clearly very anxious about the state of cleanliness of her room. Maybe if I fold her clothes, she will trust me. And the truth is, a pile of messy clothes bothers me too. I can imagine being ninety-one years old someday, lying in a hospital bed and being bothered by the dirty floor and unfolded clothes. (Enzo will still be carrying sofas at that point.)
I don’t have a mop with me, so I get to work folding her clothes. Unfortunately, all she brought is a big pile of nightgowns. Mrs. Green sort of seems like one of those women who wears nightgowns for all occasions. Again, I can see myself being like that someday. I look forward to a time when I can wear pajamas twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and not face any judgment for it.
“Hey!” she calls out. “What are you doing?”
“I’m folding your clothes for you, Mrs. Green!” I say as loudly as I can.
“You’re stealing my things!” she gasps. She jams her thumb into the red nurse call button. “Thief! Thief! Call the police!”
Even though I recognize Mrs. Green is a confused older woman, my heart skips a beat in my chest. How could she accuse me of stealing from her? I’m just trying to help her fold her clothes, like she asked me to!
A second later, the nurse supervisor for the floor, a sturdy woman named Donna, comes bustling into the room. By this point, Mrs. Green is screaming at the top of her lungs that I’m a thief and the police need to be contacted. I have dropped her clothing and I’m holding my hands up in the air, just to make it incredibly clear that I am not stealing anything from her.
“What’s going on here, Millie?” Donna asks me in her thick Long Island accent. (Or is it on her thick Long Island accent?)
“I…” I swallow hard. “I didn’t steal anything. I was just helping her with her clothes. I swear.”
“LIAR!” Mrs. Green shrieks. “She was stealing my stuff! You need to call the police right now!”
I stand in the corner of the room, squeezing my hands together while Donna does her best to calm down Mrs. Green. It takes several minutes, but after tuning the television to some show about Christmas caroling (even though it’s spring), Mrs. Green finally seems placated.
I, on the other hand, am a disaster.
I follow Donna out of the room, but my knees are still wobbly. Donna is utterly unshaken by the interaction. There’s not even one hair out of place in the high bun she keeps on her head. But by the time I get back to the nurses’ station, my head is throbbing.
“Are you okay, Millie?” Donna asks me.
“I… I didn’t steal anything.”
“Of course you didn’t.” She pulls off the stethoscope hanging from her neck. “You know she has dementia, right? It was all over the chart.”
It was all over the chart. And anyone else would have shrugged off the interaction, but I can’t. Not with my background.
Spending ten years in prison for murder changes the way you look at things.
Donna most likely doesn’t know anything about it, and I’m not eager to tell her the story. The short version is that when I was a teenager, a boy tried to rape my best friend. I walked in on them and bashed him on the head with a paperweight. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop him. So I hit him again. And again. Eventually, he stopped… breathing.
The boy’s parents were very wealthy, and they weren’t about to let me off the hook for killing their pride and joy, even though their pride and joy was a rapist. A good lawyer might have been able to get me off, but I only had the public defender, and he wasn’t a very good one. I was found guilty of manslaughter and served ten years in a women’s prison.
It’s not something I go around telling people. Even though I don’t regret helping my friend, my time behind bars is not something I’m proud of. But when this hospital hired me a couple of months before I moved out to the island, I disclosed it to them because I had to. I wasn’t sure if they would still want me after that, but they did. Social workers are in short supply.
Still, it leaves me feeling paranoid. At my last job, some objects around the hospital went missing, and I was the only one who got called in by the police to be questioned about it. It’s not like they brought me into the station or anything serious like that, but it was very clear that because of my background, they were looking at me more closely than anyone else.
Is Donna looking at me that way? Does she think I really stole something from that room? Does she know?
“Millie,” she says.
A cold sweat breaks out on my forehead. “Yes?”
“You look really pale. You should sit down.”
